"The Police" by Daniel Poppick

COMPANY EDITIONS is an independent publisher of poetry and visual art. The journal, Company, was founded in 2013 and is published three or four times per year. We will also be publishing chapbooks beginning in late 2016. Company Editions is based in Athens, GA, Iowa City, IA, and Cambridge, MA. You can contact the editors by emailing editors@companyeditions.com.

DANIEL POPPICK

THE POLICE

1.

Speech
is the fourth wall made permanent & at its window

Prayer
collects, modicum of hot noise

Insisting
in a fog we find the breeze & greenery beyond the glass most critical.

Apples
from my briefcase faster than anyone moves even in movies. Then I wake.

They
were correct

To
steal, I wasn’t even really speaking

To
them so much as you in a fuzzed prototype of what turns out

To
be this essay,

Presenting
myself as a salesman of apples

Rather
than a holy ghost

As
other apple salesmen will.

Do
you see how already in my account those unremembered features

(Of
the movie, not dream) are flattening to a billboard

Magnetizing
your gaze up from some interstate’s white lines

Toward
a romping airbrushed puppy & beaming

Child,
so that if you are to trust me to not bleed you of your brain’s money

Today
I have to be equally against whatever I’m selling & the light it emits?

In
the movie Price & the horse drone rough woe

Trotting
o’er the land

In
a series of sinister nasal eruptions concerning the whipping of witches

Between
shots of various actresses’ wide eyes & buxom screaming.

Outside
the ocean flicked

Light
at the house, seals burped on their rock behind a fat wad of cedar &
hanging

Moss.
That the horror should be taken as comedy

Watching
it transpire on a bedsheet screen

With
a collection

Of
stoned middle-aged men was reflected in their

Interrupting
to briefly bear kitsch’s thick shit

For
us with a dramatization

Of
their own. Vexed, they said things like

It’s not the hottest hot

Chocolate I’ve had but it

Will do, &

What’s going on is he hitting

Her this is horrible,&

Rain makes a hooligan

Out of the soundtrack I can’t hear
the actors

It
is now impossible to remove these men from the movie,

It
would be like editing out the horse, Price straddling thin air five feet off
the ground.

They
were too high to listen to anything, it was they who were masterpieces,

Price
watched them from the screen

&
dropped his weapons. It

Darkened
& those I love slept to the west so I joined them believing

Art
stalks us in broad daylight anyway, child with blade

Drawn
to slit our throats as we cross through a country

She
calls home & stays young in, always forgetting that our throats are
billions

&
our breath spills between.

But
forgetting our power is requisite as deliberately confusing the sound

Of
a fire truck over the hill

With
a wolf’s cry. Art needs us no less than we

It.
Otherwise the poor kid follows to our cities

To
grow old long before spilling

A
drop of our blood.

Behind
her grown-up villains, born with beards,

Follow
all & never die.

2.

Some
weeks

Before
seeing it you & I walked

Over
the Brooklyn Bridge in

Rain
without speech, though

That
conversation was of a glamour

I
did not know I knew how to submerge my brain

In
much less physical hands,

For
we are only pronouns & as such suffer through deserts of dulled nerves.

We
walked in a net

So
large the district

Slipped
through one of its holes, taxis’ dry

Groans
like houses

Gathering
the glow of an evening meal. If it means hosting nightmare like stiff wind

Sails
I’m not

Sure
one needs

To
be so quiet, there are other modes of transportation. But

Need
squeaks out from holes in demand & demands rust according to our speed.

I
would be leaving for another hemisphere in the coming

Months
& in the interim was taking a crack

At
selling you on the benefits of keeping track of our faces &

Voices
via Skype

Instead
of languishing in their absence for that duration, hoping to allay

Your
fears that this program was a load of shit & would garble

The
both of us into delayed beeps & pixels, though I was also a bit of that
mind.

Despite
our advances we have not found a clear way to speak over oceans.

3.

One
morning in October you woke & told

Me
you’d dreamed I’d been campaigning for it, I’d said

You won’t hear

My actual voice but a tone

Of it played on saxophone don’t

Worry they will still be my actual

Words only spoken

In actual saxophone, & proceeded

To
show you a shot of what my face

Would
look like on the screen, bone structure & features intact

But
with alternate translations of flickering color.

You
remained unconvinced but were

Coming
around when you woke.

It
is not impossible to fit & channel love

Through
a glowing two-dimensional

Plastic
screen but it sucks.

Something
of the flesh thereby transmitted

Did
not feel as regal as it should have to the eye alone,

Not
for one’s features

But
the spell they cast, like a metaphor about pheromones

In
which literal smells enter the face, one

I
am not capacious enough to invent at this juncture

Where
I am trying to speak

In
a grammar quick with weeping.

Given
our circumstances together under this hot

Blue
lid

Love
requires better access to somatic swoon

Than
this clusterfuck can bring to bear.

It
must be repeated

Until
the figure hardens into something liquid

As
the human frame, not impossible

For
if you are reading this transmission

Chances
are our heartbreaks at this point in history

Are
more alike than ever.

I
have been better about being alone

In
recent years but waking

Up
next to you had come to feel like having lungs, adamantine &

Hilarious.
Moving away in December

I
did not want to be reminded silence is vestigial

Or
for that matter ever leave you again

So
I’ll swallow

Whole
days shaved off a life in a country I might have known

But
never did. I did not know how to tell you about air,

Nor
now

Even
inside the parcel of this attempt.

When
we did speak lo

&
behold it was delayed in the wires. You hung

Up
on me once in anger

&
though I might have deserved & it’s unconscionably adolescent to do so I
will admit

It,
I wanted to die

As
much for knowing

That
so many others have felt crippled

Endlessly
by something as fleeting

As
fighting with a lover

As
for the digital clang

The
program’s receiver made when

You
retreated from that window

&
went back to the winterized rooms in the States I felt a cartoon version

Of
myself was already living in

An
even more inert Pinocchio,

Wan
& drawn by Disney.

I
took to the streets

Looking
to foster attention constellations

That
would protect us from all the ill we

Foist
upon one another unwillingly

Without
ever thinking that love, against

Our
beliefs & wishes, seems

To
require it

In
hot multitudes of names & inflections beyond what an hour’s exchange can
bear,

A
shitload of invention required & in love invention

Is
as difficult a gift to give another as ever,

Wanting
neither fire nor water we do our people in police’s voices.

But
when no one wanted to talk outside I went straight

Back
to the screen. I’ve never seen so many movies.

4.

In
November on the way to hear poets read we were pulled over

&
though I had only been speeding the young officer

Clad
in sunglasses despite the clouds & bruised light

Asked
me to step out of the car &

Accompany
him in his cruiser

While
he ran background checks. You shrugged & I,

Quietly
alarmed

Not
because I had done wrong but in exposure to force

Coiled
more tightly than my own

Comprehension
or sway followed him & fixed

Myself
in his front seat. He asked if this was the first time

I’d
seen one of these from the inside

&
I said it was.

Behind
us, bottled in a clean & perforated plexiglass
pane,

A
German shepherd continued completely losing her shit.

The
officer told her to shut up

&
as he ran the program on our licenses he asked what I did.

I
told him I was a teacher

Though
the truth was I was unemployed.

Ashamed
of the lie, I added

I
was also a writer. At this he looked up.

He
asked what kind of writing I did & I said poetry.

He
smiled,

&
I don’t think I’m lying to think I discerned a muted affection, but will
never be certain

As
sympathy & contempt often run the same drills

On
the field of the face.

What
kind of poetry.

I
told him that was the hardest & worst

Question
he could ask, & at that he laughed.

I
told him most of it didn’t rhyme

&
he repeated that out loud.

He
asked if I knew any of my poems by heart

&
at that I laughed,

Said
I didn’t, but wanting to offer something for his seemingly earnest curiosity
revealed

A
key poem in the book I was writing was titled

“Appetite
Technician.” He nodded & thought about that for a moment, asked

What’s
the title of the book?

I
never thought to ask his name.

5.

Another
dream. Six white horses write on a wall, their pencils repeatedly

Clattering
to the floor. They coat their hooves with

Rubber
cement & step on the pencils with superannuated care,

Continue.
Piles of shavings litter the ground around them.

Their riders sit at a nearby table playing

Online
poker, but when the wind

Picks
up the internet

Fails.
The riders curse & mount the horses,

Ride
to a meadow where the connection can be repaired. Given to fright when

The
offending riders root for their whips,

The
six horses run together

From
wall to meadow, & when they arrive they pick a variety of pens from the

Grass
with their teeth.

When
the riders are finished gluing wires they remount.

Tired
out, the horses trot

Back
to the wall with the pens. But

Six
more horses have arrived at the site,

Black
as coal & without riders, painting

Over
the pencil. They turn & stare at the first six with brushes

Hanging
limply from their lips,

&
the riders dismount to inspect the new designs.

This
is one method by which horses have been trained to study the collapse of
repetition.

6.

A
gesture runs deeper than the improbable

Stone,
someday the sun will have swatted

Our
friends underground where our childhood toys are buried & will
We then wish to share a bed with strangers

&
speak with them about all we know who have continued

Against
the promise of a grid

Diminishing
even as its points sharpen into hyperbolic focus when evening settles down?

The
reading lamp goes on,

It
does a different chemical

Reaction
than other light upon the skin

&
at that I do not know.

A
trust between all inert objects punctures night

Such
that we are forced to admit that nouns are either alive or more

Active
than we have imagined

&
this is also involved

In
our capacity to learn not only how to love correctly

But
the survival of our species.

As
for the former

It
seems I can only write this when we are apart, so perhaps as strangers

We
might learn to love to critical exhaustion

The
versions of each other who remain but avatars

For
functions impossible to be performed except in a state

Of
radical & unknowing patience

Which
works more brightly when subsumed into the muscle

Of
our waking lives, so it’s no mistake we want to fuck

Now
as we write this sentence in May, your breath the only grammar

I
want to see in color before the night is over,

Your
speech & glances made mythic by the fact that it is you who speaks.

But
even myth refutes demands

Submitted
in the story so far as it’s been told,

A
wolf wails in the distance & on the mantle above the fireplace

A
key spins in a little horse as she slows her hooves

&
when she stops the room slips into a capable darkness.

7.

May
this invention issue a multitude of orders

&
may you disobey them all

That
shatter records will shore their action

Against
our luminous attention to beam beyond a flat & white refrain.

Plucked
from the ground

Like
ribbons from a gift box packed with a doll,

Earth
needs our bones gliding over it precisely less

Than
we the song issuing five or six feet above the green.

The
decorations who make the gift thoughtful

Should
not be confused with the doll itself in all its mute & painted glamour,

As
living matter, plastic cells

Lush
with the spell

Of
carnal affinity flinging through our veins, is not the same as life.

We
love the world for what it reflects as much as for what it contains.

Now
in July others I love sleep far from the coast &

I
have trouble remembering my own dreams, rendering the one

About
Price & the horse remarkable for its knife-edged amplitude, even

If
you will never know whether or not my actual words were a lie

To
move you into believing, as belief is the only house

We
are told we are built to sleep inside.

The
movie sleeps in the air itself, the men in its glowing reviews.

By
the light of that candle it is Price & the horse

Who
are a house,

You
& I are not until cold wind & rain
incorporates

Us
into its virus of bedtimes, though on the bridge

We
were soaking

Wet
& the money-light

Was
streaming & here I am again continuing to drag you under that roof.

All
the sunset does in memory is bloom like a brand, gold pill dissolving

Into
the body of water nearest our pillow.

I’m
not against the sunset but its problems

In
advertisements are myriad as sleep.

I
recommend you go outside, see one with your own two eyes &

I’m
not selling anything free. Here is another dream for no money.

The
window weeps

A
bag of light

Into
the bedroom, white clatter

Chased
by humming filaments

&
you place your face still as flint by the light

&
your face clicks

&
fills with liquid. A holy ghost runs from your eyes

&
nose, a holy ghost green on your sleeve

Winds
its way down amalgams of streets with you while you speak to strangers

&
at home even your ice cubes pray in the dark

&
the dark weeps, sneezes

&
as night drives in its wilted nails Price hacks the coffin an unscreened
window

&
the holy horse freezes.

(11
September 2011—4 July 2012)

Daniel Poppick’s first book of poetry, The Police, is forthcoming from Omnidawn. His poems appear in the New Republic, BOMB, Granta, Fence, The Volta, Prelude and elsewhere. A chapbook, Vox Squad, is out from Petri Press. He lives in Brooklyn, where he co-edits the Catenary Press with Rob Schlegel and Rawaan Alkhatib.